"Don't expect to see key features of OpenSolaris showing up in the Linux kernel," said a top Linux maintainer. At his LinuxWorld opening keynote, Andrew Morton made it very clear that the appointment of former OSDL CTO and Debian co-founder Ian Murdock to Sun's OS platforms organization will not translate into a merging between the open source version of Solaris Unix with Linux. He didn't mince words. "It's a great shame that OpenSolaris still exists. They should have killed it," said Morton, addressing one attendee's question about the possibility of Solaris' most notable features being integrated into the kernel. "It's a disappointment and a mistake by Sun." Morton said none of those features - Zones, ZFS, DTrace - will end up in the Linux kernel because Sun refuses to adopt the GPL.

Back in Linux 2.0 days, it was still apparent that this was going to matter. The open source concept may not have had the popularity it has today, but clearly the concept was valid even then. And even if the three - at that time, four with Digital - proprietary UNIXes had chosen not to donate to Linux, but merely to merge their UNIX systems into one, it would have been better for Linux eventually. Because eventually, the advantage of doing the first merge would have made it apparent that there was an advantage of merging with Linux - allowing the Linux community to expand the development of the merged systems would have guaranteed a superior product.

It's even possible that Linux itself would never have become as popular as it is now. But the merged UNIX system, if open sourced, would still have likely been more well received than Windows on the server side.

But the Linux development probably would still have mattered because it stimulated the desktop side of UNIX, which a merged group of server editions would likely not have done, unless open sourced early.

As for the licensing issues, they could have been worked out. There's no a priori proof that isn't true. Merging three UNIX systems would on the one hand have compounded the problem, but on the other hands perhaps one technology that could not be re-licensed could have been replaced by an equivalent technology from one of the other UNIX systems that could be re-licensed.

In any event, merging the three or four develop teams would have made it likely that the licensing issues could be avoided by re-engineering.

Linux doesn't have that problem because it is re-engineering everything in the kernel space anyway. It still would have benefited from having things like the XSF file system donated by Silicon Image (who "got it" early on, unlike the other UNIX companies).

As for Windows, a merged UNIX/Linux would have been cheaper than Windows, had it been open sourced early enough. Had that been done early enough in the UNIX/Linux life cycle, Windows would not have been nearly as good as it was by Windows XP. I'm not saying Windows wouldn't have still had the bulk of the market share due to their near-monopoly contractual methods - but the market share of UNIX/Linux would have been much better than it is now by this time.

As for the reaction of the UNIX companies customers, that is another red herring. While some people might have disliked being forced to migrate, the advantage of having all the advantages of each UNIX system in one would have assuaged a great deal of that. Keep in mind that such a merger would NOT have been toward a "new, unproven thing", but rather the marshalling of three or four proven UNIX systems into one.

Nothing about that scenario is "ridiculous".

Finally, the statement that "Windows is where it is today because Windows admins are cheap, because Windows is familiar, and because it works ok most of the time" is only partly true. Microsoft got convicted of being a monopoly not because of those reasons, but because of its behavior in the marketplace. More importantly, Windows got where it is because most of the people charged with paying for it - corporate management - are idiots who didn't look ahead to the hidden costs of the Windows monoculture.